Messages - roguejim

I have one of the ceramic reptile lamps with the metal "safety cage" around it. I place the safety cage on a pyrex pie pan that fits perfectly onto the condenser box in my fermentation freezer. I works great and has consistently for a couple years now.

Day-afternoon temps have been in mid-60s; night temps in mid-40s. Shop is uninsulated, and currently at 58F, outside air temp, 53F. Supposedly, temps will hit 68F by this afternoon.

I have a side-by-side refr/freezer that holds 2 carboys, stacked, on the fridge side. I use a Johnson thermostat/controller to maintain ale/lager temps in Summer. Since temps are dropping at night, I'm thinking of hanging an incandescent (halogen, maybe?) light bulb inside to keep it warm. What watt bulb would you guess would suffice?

I use a copper immersion chiller. The last time I used this strain, was for a hefe. No sulphur. The time before was a dunkelweizen that produced sulphur. I guess I kegged it before all the sulphur had dissipated. Now, another dunkelweizen, and sulphur again. I'll give it plenty of time before kegging, 2 weeks, maybe even 3. I've never used any weizen yeast strain besides Weihenstephan.

As the fermentation subsides, will the sulphur still be able to get past the airlock? Do I want to remove the airlock, and put a piece of foil over the top of the carboy?

Here's the particulars: 1.056SG Dunkelweizen. Used a 1L starter/stir plate. Yeast was only 1 month old to begin with. Two days fermenting at 64F, and I'm getting aroma of sulphur in the fridge. Should I leave the beer in the fermenter until sulphur aroma dissipates? Any tricks to getting the sulphur out? The last dunkelweizen turned out the same way, but I kegged it, then ended up dumping the keg because I couldn't stand the sulphur aroma.

Where I live in southern Oregon, this seems to be a recent phenomenon in the last couple of years, i.e., that most, if not all smack paks are partly swollen (some worse than others) at the retailers. I don't like it, but, maybe it's not really an issue?

Correction: Bestmalz is my pils malt. The wheat malt is whatever German brand the LHBS is selling.

As for the crush, my mill is set such that my efficiency runs 75-77% for all brews in the ~1.050 range. This hefe came in at 64%. Maybe I'll have the LHBS pulverize the crap out of it next time since I don't want to mess with my mill on the few occasions when I brew a wheat beer.